cover photo

Passage to Juneau

Jonathan Raban

I bought this book because it appeared to be a story of a trip on the Inside Passage to Alaska. I had taken the trip in a boat on the Alaska Marine Highway, and one of our lecturers had taken the trip alone in a sea kayak. Mr. Raban made the trip in a thirty–five foot sailboat. He started in Seattle and went by way of the passage between Vancouver Island and the Canadian mainland. By page 275 he was in England attending his father’s funeral and his boat was at Potts Lagoon, in the channel between Vancouver Island and the Canadian Mainland. He traveled slowly because he was traveling in narrow waters where both tides and storms can create hazardous conditions for boats. Even boats the size of those on the Alaska Marine Highway carefully pick their routes in accordance with the tides and the weather; it made me wonder how the lady in the sea kayak managed and what problems she had getting there.

When he was not moving, Raban filled the pages with stories of George Vancouver’s explorations during his year and a half in the Pacific Northwest. I was glad to read something about Vancouver. The most I had ever read about him was that Mt. Rainier was named after one of his crew. Since I had recently read Dava Sobel’s book Longitude, I was interested to read that Vancouver used both the chronometer and the lunar sightings methods of determining his longitude. The great accuracy of the chronometer method more than met the requirements for a three–month voyage to the West Indies, but for a trip of a year and a half the more complicated method of “taking the lunars” provided the greater accuracy that was needed. The plan for this voyage called for the author’s wife and daughter to meet him in Juneau and the three of them to cruise Alaskan waters in a family sight–seeing trip. They all did meet in Juneau, but the book ends as his wife tells him that their marriage is over and that she is leaving him.

The book was not what I had expected.

— Warren Langdon

[top]